


Spring Haze

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: AU-Victorian gothic, Aphrodisiacs, Choking, Dirty Talk, Drugged Sex, Dubious Consent, Large Cock, M/M, Masturbation, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Oral Sex, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Possessive Behavior, Rough Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Sex Pollen, Smoking, Voyeurism, gratuitous use of the word “pet”
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:29:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25582885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: A man who knows things. That’s the singular impression given off by the shabby little stranger who saunters into the village inn that cool spring afternoon, just ahead of the storm. Bridgens, the innkeeper, eyes him warily from his stool in the corner. He will not of course, refuse service to any stranger and even has the reputation of lodging and feeding those who came to him without coin, but this man, his gut tells him, is after neither bed or sustenance. A man who knows things trades in knowing more: it’s his stock and wages in one, idle observations and secret histories are; lineages and folklore and local enmities... and it’s villainous work. Bridgens had known a few such men in the navy and many more during his brief stint as a prison guard. When such a man is paid, he knows, the cost is carved from another man’s flesh.
Relationships: Henry Collins/Harry D. S. Goodsir, Henry Collins/Harry Goodsir/Cornelius Hickey, John Bridgens/Harry Peglar, William Gibson (1823-c.1848) & John Irving (1815-c.1848), William Gibson/Cornelius Hickey
Comments: 24
Kudos: 53





	1. Feast Like a King

**Author's Note:**

> Italicized literary passages, unless noted otherwise, are from Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_.

A man who knows things. That’s the singular impression given off by the shabby little stranger who saunters into the village inn that cool spring afternoon, just ahead of the storm. Bridgens, the innkeeper, eyes him warily from his stool in the corner. He will not of course, refuse service to any stranger and even has the reputation of lodging and feeding those who came to him without coin, but this man, his gut tells him, is after neither bed or sustenance. A man who knows things trades in knowing more: it’s his stock and wages in one, idle observations and secret histories are; lineages and folklore and local enmities... and it’s villainous work. Bridgens had known a few such men in the navy and many more during his brief stint as a prison guard. When such a man is paid, he knows, the cost is carved from another man’s flesh. 

The stranger glances between Bridgens and the young barkeep Billy, who unfolds his long body from his chair and drapes himself over the bar, all elbow and and blond curl, offering the stranger a tentative smile as he does so. Inwardly, Bridgens scowls. He didn’t hired Billy for his friendliness and to be fair, he rarely was. He’d hired him because—well, he suspected he was a man like himself, a drinker of coffee when most men preferred tea, and lord knows such men must look out for each other. He is a quiet lad, and can be curt, but he works hard slinging ale, keeping the place neat, and circumventing fights before they begin. But he’s also possessed of a lonely and disappointed romantic streak, and this stranger—this shabbily-dressed little man, whom Bridgens instantaneously and immensely loathes—does have about him that kind of glow a fool like Billy would mistake for earnest warmth. The stranger’s eyes trace the elegant lines of Billy’s body with an inviting leisureliness and, deciding that he likes what he sees, returns the smile crookedly, wolfishly. A crinkling at the edges of his storm blue eyes. 

_Well, that’s that, then,_ Bridgens thinks to himself bitterly. _Whatever the stranger wants, he’ll be given._ His eyes linger on the stranger a moment longer, committing a sketch to memory just in case he had to describe him later to the coppers: a prominent nose jutting out over a doll-like little mouth nestled crookedly in a scant red mustache and beard; his red hair beneath a traveling cap overlong and tucked behind his ears. Soon their voices have dropped too low for Bridgens to hear, so with one last pointed glance he returns his attention to the book lying open in his lap. _...when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon,_ he read, _as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created._

A few minutes later, Billy approaches Bridgens timidly. “Sir,” he says, his voice abashed, “if I may have your leave for half an hour? Mr. Hickey would like shown the way to Irewood.”

“Can Mr. Hickey not read directions written down for him?” Bridgens’ tone is mild. 

“I’d like the company,” Mr. Hickey says from the bar, flicking a pleased glance over Billy’s shoulders and backside. He’d rolled a cigarette and exhales as he speaks, then draws the smoke back in through his nostrils. A showy little git he is—he poses no immediate bodily danger to Billy, surely, who though wiry has at least a head’s height on him. But foreboding fills Bridgens’ chest, a slow and dark bloom. _For Christ’s sake, John,_ he scolds himself, _he’s eight-and-twenty. Older than Harry’d been when—well, he’s hardly a babe, anyway._ The older man smiles, but his eyes are sharp with worry. “One hour if you need,” he says. Then, softer, “Watch yourself, Billy. Please.” 

———

“What business takes you to Irewood?” Billy asks, peering down into Hickey’s face as he lights the cigarette he’s rolled for him. It is the time of afternoon when everything blazes with a light so fierce it seems the world is illuminated from within, the young flowers like cups bearing flame. There’s a purity to how the sun falls on all things, a cleansing chill to the air. Does one wear one’s coat or take it off? For the moment Billy leaves it on, for when the breeze picks up the air flashes nervily cold. Heaped pewter clouds skate across the western horizon. 

“Not business,” Cornelius Hickey grins crookedly. “Pleasure.” His arm brushes the back of Billy’s hand as he speaks; his eyes dance. Billy swears he can feel both the incidental touch and the inviting gaze down his spine, and for a moment he feels dizzy. Then flushed. Must be the cigarette—he hasn’t smoked in forever. “Tell me, Billy,” Hickey asks, “was that your father back there?” 

“Bridgens? No—my employer only.” 

Cornelius nods. The breeze has drawn his blood to his cheeks: it’s lovely. _He’s_ lovely, Billy thinks distantly, but with no real agenda. To work an agenda calls for hope, something Billy doesn’t quite manage. But God, does he _want_. This small, sharp, glittering thing. He would go to his hands and knees right here for him if only he would ask, right in front of the church and the little heap of stones in the yard. The crosses and the lambs and the chipped obelisks. Let the dead see, and the living too—old rector Franklin with his face like a tarnished spoon, Bridgens so fretful and prudish as though he did not share his bed with a lad more than half his age. “Truly,” Billy adds with a soft grin, eyes downcast. “There is no other connection between us.”

“Good,” Cornelius beams, letting his fingers alight ever so briefly on Billy’s delicate wrist. (They burn like a brand.) “That’s what I was hoping to hear.”

He doesn’t ask, in the end. He thrusts Billy against the splintered wood of the abandoned barn at the edge of the village and takes. It’s as though he’s peered into Billy, felt out the hulking shape of his heart with his long and elegant fingers; as though he’s scried in the cringing, gentle rhythm of his glances and body language the kind of loving Billy craves. And it is not, strictly speaking, _loving_ at all. When Billy returns to the inn after one minute shy of an hour, his left cheek is scraped raw from the dirt floor of the barn and bite marks garland the base of his neck. 

“You’ll wear your coat until these heal,” Bridgens says to him, his voice soft with worry. “And tell anyone who asks, you were in a fight.” Billy nods, but his eyes have a dreamy cast about them, and the line of his mouth—normally a fretful half-pout—wears a voluptuous looseness. Ravished. And all night he glows, as though illuminated from within. As though gilded. 

“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Bridgens tells Harry later that night as they lay huddled in their narrow attic bed. “Perhaps I am too protective of him.”

“What seemed so bad about this Hickey?” Harry asks and as Bridgens—John, now, at Harry’s side, just as Harry’s now no longer Mr. Peglar the grocer—gazes into his partner’s wide-set, earnest eyes and considers the near thirty birthdays that lie between them he finds he cannot give a convincing reason. Husbands, they would have been in another life—a gentler and more enlightened world. Harry had said once with a blushing grin that he wanted what brides want, to wear John’s name and be carried like a prize over the threshold.

“I can’t put my finger on it,” Bridgens concedes, brows knit. 

“But you’re rarely wrong about these things.”

“Aye.”

“Oh, John.” Harry reached up and strokes Bridgens’ soft silver hair, lays a chaste kiss on his lips. “I hate to see you worry—your heart’s too large.” Then, after a pause, and in a lower voice, playful, “Worry about me instead.”

“Oh? And why’s that?”

Harry offers a cheeky grin as his hand snakes beneath the covers. Moments later, Bridgens’ mouth falls open with a soft gasp. “Am I your boy?” Harry asks.

“Always— _oh,_ Christ. How did I get so lucky?”

“It’s not luck, silly,” Harry laughs into Bridgens’ throat as his fist finds a soft, steady rhythm beneath the blanket. “I know a good man when I see one.” With that, he ducks under the quilt, his mouth following his hand.

“No,” Bridgens says in a tone of gentle pleading as he peels the covers back. “Let me watch, won’t you?” 

———

Hickey had expected someone older. A gaunt septuagenarian, perhaps, all white whiskers and knobby knuckles. Acerbically terse. Or a verbose grandfather grown nauseatingly paunchy among the vines and briars. Having come so far and turned over so many stones to find him, he simply expected someone—different. But he’s very pleased. Henry Collins, the gardener he’s sought high and low, is a big man, not as tall as that pretty barkeep but stoutly joisted, all muscle and mirth. He’s got perhaps ten years on Hickey, little creases around his eyes and a touch of silver in his shaggy hair and deep sideburns, but his every motion vibrates with the careless energy of a lad. A messy excess of vitality. It’s the kind of energy that turns to misery or trouble if not continuously directed toward an end. He sits Hickey down in the servant’s kitchen with the casual warmth of an old friend and sets to preparing tea before he even asks who Hickey is, what he’s there for. An easy heart—Hickey can scent one a mile away. He’d love to sink his teeth in, but that’s not what he’s here for. He has things to learn, secrets to barter with and for.

He gazes around the servants’ basement kitchen. The ceiling’s low and crossed by deep beams from which pans and pots and clustered alliums hang; the walls might have been freshly white a century prior. It’s a dim room, but warm, and feels well-loved. Books line the heavy shelf on the opposite side of the table; one lies on its side. Atop it a pair of spectacles. Into the corner, angled halfway between the shelf and the counter at which Collins stands is crammed an empire-style chair, its jacquard cushion well-worn. Hickey rises and runs his fingers along the spines of the books: anatomy, chemistry, calculus. Field guides—all that Latin nomenclature, as though the things of the wild were tamed by naming them. This is a shared space, then. These books, Hickey reasons, must belong to Harry Goodsir, eccentric scientist and Collins’ employer. _What other rooms do they share?_ he wonders idly as he wanders back to his chair and takes out his tobacco pouch. 

“I’m sorry we’ve near naught to offer for tea,” Collins is saying as he noisily chops apples. The kettle sings shrilly. 

“Please, no need to apologize,” Hickey says. “I had something from the inn in town.” And anyway, Collins has already set out plenty: a round of whey-colored cheese, a wedge of dark, holey bread, a squat jar of pickled onions. Mustard and gherkins and clouded honey. Hickey helps carry it all to the table. “If this is ‘near naught’,” he observes, “you must feast like a king.”

“It’s near Dr. Goodsir’s supper too,” Collins notes, sweeping the apples onto a dish with the knife. “He’ll be down.”

“He eats down here? In the servants’ kitchen?”

Collins shrugs. “We don’t stand on ceremony much.” He breaks off a chunk of bread, spreads it thick with honey, and crams it into his mouth. Such _joie de vivre_ , so much brute strength. Hickey’s eyes linger on his mouth as he chews: be a shame to let such a hunger go to waste.

When Collins seems to have eaten the edge off his appetite, Hickey rolls another cigarette and tilts it toward him. “Smoke?” He says. His eyes dance and dip again to Collins’ lips as his own curl into a crooked grin.


	2. The First Taste

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains non-consensual aphrodisiac use so if that’s not your thing, please be aware.

It’s past midnight by the time Goodsir’s hunger drags him downstairs. He often forgets to eat until his body begs him, doesn’t sleep until he dozes on his feet in his lab. More lately—he’s so close. He only needs something to restore vitality—it is useless to recover one’s fellows from the grip of sickness if they are listless, depressed; if they willingly waste away, exhausted and undernourished. ( _You’ve evidently taken it yourself then,_ Collins had teased when Goodsir explained the trouble to him. His fingers darted at his side. _Eat, eat. I can count your ribs._ ) Goodsir slows as he descends the narrow stone stairway. The kitchen should be dark and empty, and Collins long abed. But there’s a dull gold light seeping up from beneath the kitchen door. He eases it slowly open and is startled by what he sees. 

To be fair, Collins _is_ asleep. Dead drunk passed out, in fact, at the foot of Goodsir’s own reading chair, his cheek—mouth slung open in a slow , metered snore—smushed against the cushion, his knees tucked beneath him. It isn’t like Collins to drink, let alone become foolishly drunk, but looking around Goodsir realizes that he has had help: there are two places set at the table, and two pint glasses, one still mostly full of some kind of clouded ale. An emptied wine bottle too. He revises his assessment: it’s not like him to get drunk alone, but he’d done so a handful of times with friends.

Goodsir stiffly inspects the leavings on the table: a couple of cigarettes stabbed out on a chipped saucer. Browning apple slices. Cheese left to sweat and queasily soften. Annoyed, he turns back to Collins and gives his hip a tap with the toe of his boot. Then another. Waking one’s inebriated friends is something Goodsir had little experience with, having little experience with friendship generally. When this is ineffective, he shakes him stoutly by the shoulder, starting with a rabbit’s flamboyant panic and snatching his hand back when Collins snorts. It seems as though he is going to wake, but instead he only mutters something and tries to turn as though in bed. His cheek slides from the cushion and he sinks heavily onto his side, then rolls onto his back. 

Goodsir’s eyes snap instantly to a heavy curve of flesh where flesh should not be exposed. It’s—massive. In all his years as a student of the human form, he has never seen anything like this. Monstrous yet quiescent, it hangs ponderously to one side, a pretty creamy pink from root to glans. It’s an endearing thing somehow, just resting there, as peaceable and unaware of itself as a big slumbering dog. Goodsir itches to touch it, to gauge its heft with his palm. But then his higher faculties catch up with him and he scrambles to his feet, backs out of the room, and sprints up to his own bedchamber. It’s a drafty room, minimally furnished, with worn gray bed curtains pulled loosely back from his unmade bed. The silvery green wallpaper is mottled and peeling. He sinks heavily down at the edge of the mattress. _Imagine_ , he thinks uneasily, _if he’d woken and—he would naturally think—that you were—that you had—and what then?_ With trembling hands he palms his own humiliatingly rigid prick, then draws it out carefully, wincingly. He averts his eyes so he will not witness what he himself is doing.

Collins would wake, Goodsir imagines, to the sight of him staring at his, his—at _him_ , and scramble to cover himself. Mortified, humiliated— _no,_ Harry reflects, _that’s how you’d react._ Collins is probably cocksure, proud. He’d calmly accept Goodsir’s curious gaze, understand its innocence. Its purely scientific nature. _You can touch it if you’d like,_ Collins would say, taking Goodsir’s hands (for one would not suffice) and laying them upon it. As though he were presenting him with a gift—a deep, boyish shining in his eyes. And such an accommodating, gregarious animal would Collins’ prick be that even Goodsir’s tentative, virginal ministrations would stir it. 

A bead of bright fluid blooms from his slit and with his thumb he spreads around. Collins would guide him, his large coarse hands cupped around Goodsir’s own, showing him how to please him. How to bring it to swell and harden further, almost impossibly large—Goodsir’s fist is tight and dry and quick, a relentless piston; his eyes are shut and his brow softly knit. “You can...” Collins would grin at him, his teasing grin Goodsir so loves. “...you can taste it,” Collins would offer, “if you’d like.” He imagines kneeling over Collins’ lap, the stone floor chill and ungiving through the knees of his trousers—the first taste, more weight than flavor—“there we go,” Collins would murmur, ever so gentle, his voice and his eyes—a deep, glad gleam in them—goodness, but him, him, _him_ , “that’s a good boy,” and Goodsir spends with a soft, broken moan, his other fist clutching and releasing, clutching and releasing, his heaped bed linens. 

———

“I’m making a stew,” Bridgens offers by way of explanation as he steps through the door of the greengrocers’ shop. 

“All right,” Harry Peglar says with a laugh. Then, in a lower voice, “don’t you get enough of me at home?”

Bridgens smiles softly as he approaches the counter. His hair, black and silver in thick streaks, is swept back from his face with sweat and his shirtsleeves are rolled up, revealing heavily furred, strong forearms. His fingers rest for a scant moment on Harry’s elbow before withdrawing. “Never,” he says quietly. Then, louder, more hale, he says, “hot, isn’t it?”

Harry’s hazel gaze flicks with something dangerous—there’s something about how John looks in the heat, all gleaming and flushed by the sun, the twin v’s of sweat he knows are darkening their way at this very moment down the back of his collar and up the small of his back. He is always dressed just as a respectable innkeeper should be dressed, regardless of the weather. It’s surprising he’s even shed his coat for this errand, lest someone read anything unseemly in his errand to the young bachelor grocer across the way. It’s an exhausting fiction, and one Harry longs to shatter in the worst way. The only unnatural thing about him and John, he figures, is the elaborate pretense they keep up. He drops his gaze, embarrassed by his reaction to his lover’s mere presence—a soft little quickening in his prick just because the man is there and is sweating, for Christ’s sake. There and sweating and strong, strong enough to bend him over the counter—displayed like oranges in a porcelain dish—

“Yes,” he says lamely. “It’s a heat wave for certain.”

“Uncharacteristic for April, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Peglar?”

 _This is bloody painful,_ Peglar thinks and smiled wanly. “Yes,” he says. “Though it’s nearly May.” 

“I suppose it is.” A bead of sweat rolls down his temple and Harry suppresses the urge to lick it from his cheek before it’s absorbed by his beard. 

The moment is saved by Cornelius Hickey, of all people. Since he’d been hired on at Irewood as a handyman and apprentice gardener a month or so prior, he’d proven himself to be an industrious, genial, and bright young man, liked by all. And yet... how to describe it? It’s something he and Harry have discussed in private. There’s a kind of unwholesomeness simmering just beneath the surface of him, an unwelcome assessing glint to his eye. It is like to some secret end he is figuring out how everything works, how every _one_ works, and what he intends to do with that knowledge is anyone’s guess. But since he’s done nothing but good, Bridgens keeps his concerns to himself. And anyway, Billy’s a little less churlish in love, even if he’s had to be lectured on the absolute impropriety of, say, appearing with bruises about his neck in public or undressing his lover with his eyes from across a room. They are not in the least careful. 

Now the source of said bruises ambles up to the counter, grinning. “Good afternoon, sirs,” he says.

“Mr. Hickey!” Harry nods back. “What can I do for you?” 

“It’s funny,” he says, waggling his head and picking up one of the little oranges from the dish on the counter. “Where I’m from, the grocers was a place for gossip. Old men hanging about, flapping their jaws.” When neither man answers, he claps Bridgens on the back. “Now, I know rumors and supposition can be baneful for men like... ourselves.” He drops a coin onto the counter and thrusts one soil-grimed thumbnail into the stippled exoflesh of the orange. “But let us try. Tell me what you know.”

“What are you after?” Bridgens asks stiffly. 

Hickey shrugs and tilts his head, a dimly coquettish gesture. 

“I’m afraid we’re not rumormongers,” Harry explains. “We—keep to ourselves.”

“Naturally.” He takes a deep drag off his cigarette.

“I wish, in fact—“ Bridgens begins abruptly, then is silent.

“You wish what, Mr. Bridgens?”

He bows his head. “I wish you and Billy would keep yourselves to yourselves a little more as well.” A pained expression crosses his face. “For your own good, I mean.”

“Is it so obvious?” Hickey asks earnestly.

Bridgens nods somberly. “It’s for your own wellbeing,” he advises.

Hickey’s face is thoughtful as he rolls a cigarette. “What about you, Mr. Peglar?” His sharp little tongue tip darts out to moisten the edge of the rolling paper. 

“Mr. Bridgens is probably correct—“

“Probably?” Hickey exhales a thick stream of smoke which hangs in the sluggish air between them. “Don’t you have your own thoughts on the matter?” 

Harry shrugs. The smell of Hickey’s tobacco is unusual, but he likes it. A trace of something sweetly medicinal to it. He glances to Bridgens, who looks as though he’d like for a sinkhole to maw open beneath him and swallow him whole. “I don’t think this is an appropriate conversation,” he gruffs.

“All I’m saying,” Hickey says, exhaling this time toward Bridgens, “is that within certain bounds, it is... quite pleasant to affirm one’s—how shall I put it delicately?” Another plume of sweet, white smoke. He cocks his head, a sly glint in his eye. “—one’s belonging to the other. All animals crave that, do they not?” 

Bridgens and Peglar are rooted in place. Bridgens’ face is livid, the red of a crab’s shell, but he seems unwilling to move. Peglar simply finds himself returning to the vision from earlier—held by the back of his neck against the counter by John’s broad hand, the rough fingers of his other hand plundering him without mercy. He watches another bead of sweet roll down Bridgens’ face and swears he can feel it on his own skin, as though someone were dragging their nail lightly down his own cheek. He realizes in that moment that there’s something in the cigarettes Hickey smokes, some kind of—sense-heightening agent. And he doesn’t care. 

“Don’t you want them to know he’s yours?” Hickey is saying softly to John. “A sweet little lad like this—you never know who might be eyeing him. Why, if Billy hadn’t told me nearly first thing—“

“He _what_?”

“Relax. I would’ve figured it out. But say I hadn’t, and I were to—“ he drags on his dwindling cigarette, deep and leisurely, then leans toward Harry’s face, lips parted—and in a flash the old innkeeper’s hand is on Hickey’s collar, hurling him back. And in the next moment, he’s leaned over the counter kissing Harry—if one could call it a kiss. It’s this frantic, crushing act, Harry’s head wrenched sideways by John’s hand buried in his hair. He parts by seizing his lip between his teeth, grinding the tender flesh between them until a little bead of blood appears.

“He is _mine_ ,” Bridgens pronounces. Then softly to Harry he says, “isn’t that right? You’re my boy?”

“Always,” Harry says, grinning. His eyes are dilated and his voice nearly slurred.

“Show him,” Bridgens returns.

“Perhaps in the back of the store,” Hickey suggests. “Keeping ourselves to ourselves and all.”

He guides them into the back room of the store, one hand on the shoulder of each, cigarette stub between his elegant fingers trailing smoke toward the rafters.


	3. May Queen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hickey grabs the the back of Billy’s head and exhales a tumble of white smoke into the other his mouth, then seals his lips with his own. When he pulls away and offers the cigarette to Billy, Billy takes it, the edges of his mouth tight. He hadn’t meant to do this again. He hadn’t. Again today? Again ever? Before, just now, they’d done it sober, and he prefers it that way. Hickey’s rough either way but there’s a fumbling joyfulness about it when he’s sober, like he rises to the surface of himself. It’s not like that, usually: usually you look in his eyes and whoever’s looking back is not quite who he seemed to be a moment before. As the drug threads its spidery way into his brain, Billy imagines himself entering a room where he hears Hickey talking and finding it empty, but there’s a door, beyond which he hears him talking, so he enters that room and finds it empty, but there’s a door—

“You should’ve heard it, Billy,” Hickey is saying, “the sort of things they were saying. Especially Harry. I didn’t think the lad was capable of such filth.” 

They’re lying on a quilt in the grass behind the games-keepers’ cottage in the thick pine woods from which the whole estate of Irewood took its name hundreds of years ago. They’ve fluttered the moth-bitten cover down in the one clearing the sun reaches among so much saturnine darkness and have just finished fucking. Billy would like to be able to call it something else, but that’s the only apt word—this single brutal syllable and all it implies. What’s funny is the tenderness before and after, the honeyed words. Billy smiles softly and rolls onto his stomach. His back is bare, a dense constellation of freckles across each shoulder and sparser between. “Everyone is capable of something,” he says. “What kind of things did he say?”

“He wants the whole world to know who he belongs to. He wants everyone to see. He wishes he could be fucked by Bridgen’s fat cockstand—which, to be fair, is impressive, though it’s nothing next to that gut-scraper Mr. Collins has got—until he’s all gaped open like a burlap sack. Spend all sloshing out, down his thighs. And everybody could come look like he was on display at a museum. Christ and queen and all, for all he cared.” 

Billy’s face is impassive as Hickey speaks, though he doesn’t like how he’s made his voice oversoft in vague mockery of the polite grocer. “And what did Mr. Bridgens make of that kind of talk?”

“He couldn’t catch his breath, the poor man. That lad’ll suck him dry.”

“I’m sure he appreciates your concern.” Billy’s face turns fretful. “He’ll have you run out of town, Cornelius.”

“For what, Billy? He ought to _thank_ me, the miserable meek old bastard. For giving him an audience.” As he speaks, he rolls a cigarette, carefully twisting a few blackish-blue strands of the dried herb he calls Spring Haze into the tobacco. Then he pauses, smiles to himself, and twines twice over as much in. “In for a penny,” he murmurs. With a sidewise dart of his tongue he licks the edge of the paper, rolls the cigarette between his fingers, and twists off the ends. 

“And what of Mr. Collins? Did he appreciate the audience?” Billy recalls the scene Cornelius had described to him, the ruggedly built manor gardener drugged and drunk, weeping as messily as _a boy with a scraped knee_ (Hickey’s exact words) as he frigged himself against Dr. Goodsir’s reading chair. 

Hickey shrugs and takes a deep drag. As he speaks, the unusually pale smoke billows from his lips. “He’ll be grateful too, in the end. You all will.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry about it, Billy.” He lays a chain of light little kisses down Billy’s shoulder and bare arms. 

Billy picks up his shirt and sits up, pulling once again out of Hickey’s reach. “Cornelius,” he says, “what do you mean?” 

Hickey casts his eyes down and grins that crooked grin that means he simply won’t answer. “Are you going somewhere?” he asks instead, leaning to reach for Billy’s face. Strokes the high curve of his cheekbone with his thumb, then drags down along his jaw, glides his fingers around the back of his neck. _Now he kisses me,_ Billy knows. _Now we begin again._

Hickey grabs the the back of Billy’s head and exhales a tumble of white smoke into his mouth, then seals his lips with his own. When he pulls away and offers the cigarette to Billy, Billy takes it, the edges of his mouth tight. He hadn’t meant to do this again. He hadn’t. Again today? Again ever? Before, just now, they’d done it sober, and he prefers it that way. Hickey’s rough either way but there’s a fumbling joyfulness about it when he’s sober, like he rises to the surface of himself. It’s not like that, usually: usually you look in his eyes and whoever’s looking back is not quite who he seemed to be a moment before. As the drug threads its spidery way into his brain, Billy imagines himself entering a room where he hears Hickey talking and finding it empty, but there’s a door, beyond which he hears him talking, so he enters that room and finds it empty, but there’s a door—

His thoughts are breaking apart like— what is something that breaks apart like this? A thawing and thinning and muddling. He was prone to nightmares as a child and always tried to stay awake, and can remember listening to his parents’ voices, how as he was pulled inexorably toward sleep they’d distort and eddy about him, no longer sound alone but a shape in his head, amorphous, like paint spilled on a tilted surface. He thinks of this now, his body ascendant and his mind left to sluggish half-sleep.

“You’re like an incubus,” he says to Hickey. His tongue sings where it touches the walls of his mouth. 

“Shh,” Hickey answers, climbing astride him. “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

“Did you hear me? I said...” He waves his thin hand airily. He’s forgotten.

Hickey gives him the best smile and lowers his mouth to his ear. “You’re so fucking beautiful, Billy,” he hears Hickey saying, _feels_ him saying: light little scraping paws along his jaw, a prickling along his cock. Hickey’s lips are soft and wet and warm. His lips are soft and wet and warm, and his teeth are sharp, and his mouth is all there is.

“You really are the most beautiful. My May Queen. We’ll put flowers... in your hair,” he murmurs, beginning to rut against Billy’s thigh, “wreathe you in ribbons. They ought to — make offerings for you like the Pagans do, you’re so lovely, all fair and tall—with such a lovely, fair, tall prick—and your cunny, too, the snuggest and sweetest in the land. And your mouth, your fucking mouth—wish I had a hundred eyes and a hundred mouths and a hundred hands and a hundred pricks and if I did I’d fuck and worship and fuck and pray to you three-hundred times over...” 

His fingers feel electric and leave reverberating warmth in their wake as he ghosts them along the side of Billy’s neck. He presses his thumb hard, harder, into the Billy’s throat, then his whole hand is cupping, crushing, damming the river of his breath. And he goes on babbling: a litany of praise punctuated by ecstatic little gasps. His other hand’s on Billy’s prick, dragging slowly up and down the fevered, impossibly hard length of it. He feels himself give a strangled moan, the edge of his consciousness pulsing gray. It is—sublime. He has never felt so close to holiness. He is not afraid. He is not afraid. He is not afraid. Then Hickey lets go. Billy sucks in great volleys of warm, sweet air—can smell the grass and the mud and Hickey’s body as Hickey’s mouth moves slowly downward. 

He takes him into his mouth. This, he has never done before: it has always been the other way around. Yet Hickey does it with no flourish, no prelude, opening his lips as though to speak but instead swallowing the whole twitching, fevered length of him in one swift motion. Billy bucks and cries out as though in pain. It’s a punishing bliss he can’t think beyond: he _is_ this near-pain, this million-veined trembling. He exists only where Hickey’s mouth bewitches him into being, a pure and scalding thing, no bigger round than Hickey’s open, suckling lips. He closes his eyes—the world’s a soak of color too vivid to bear—and hovers there, a spilling-out of light. At this point he doesn’t know where Hickey ends and he begins and he doesn’t care, he doesn’t. Hickey might swallow him whole for all he cares.

His crisis is sudden but unwinds slow, slow, slow. Billy opens his eyes in time to see Hickey open his mouth so as to take the lion’s share of his spend on his outstretched tongue and grinning lips. One spurt festoons his scant red goatee. And the strangest thing—the most wondrous—is this look he’s got on his face. Dazed, sated—grateful. 

“Everyone’s capable of something,” Billy says for the second time that afternoon.

“What?” Cornelius asks, licking Billy’s spend from his lips with his sharp little tongue. 

“Mmm, never mind.” 

Clumsily then Hickey maneuvers him onto his chest and knees, and presses right up against him, just licking his fingers to slick him up. Thank God he’s got such a small prick. Even still, it hurts, which is fine: he’s seen more to him than pain, and he doesn’t intend to let him forget it. 

———

“You’re avoiding me,” Collins says, leaning, elbows bent, against the only bit of table in the entire lab not blanketed in papers and books. He sounds half-coquettish and half-miserable and Goodsir wishes he hadn’t let him in. But he wouldn’t be deterred, and he’d said so. 

“I’m very busy,” Goodsir stammers, staring at Collins’ forearms, at his large hands cupped around the edge of the table, at his muscular legs crossed at the ankle. “I almost have it, I feel.” He doesn’t have to say what it is he almost has, for he has almost had it for years: a way of saving victims of wasting diseases. There are a myriad of diseases, he has explained, which present as the inability or unwillingness to take sustenance; this in itself must be treated in order to glean the underlying issue and cure it. Therefore, one must create appetite where there is none, conjure vitality from complete lassitude. And anyway, he’s lying. He’s made no progress whatsoever. Actually, he’s largely spent the last month reading gothic novels to pass the time between hasty, guilt-addled masturbatory sessions and the taking of sustenance and sleep his body requires. He realizes with a surge of affection that he’s been in a bad way, as he’s been a few times before, and Collins is here to bring him into the light of the world again, as he’s always done. He smiles apologetically, saying nothing: his gratitude is inexpressible. 

“No, you’re avoiding me,” Collins insists, a pleading edge to his voice. “And I don’t know what I’ve done.” 

“You’ve not done _any_ thing, Henry, because I’ve not been avoiding you.”

“Is it because I hired a man without your leave? Because he’s a hard worker, and I can’t keep it up myself; I did not think you’d mind—“

“You might have asked, yes,” he agrees, thinking briefly of the inquisitive, oily Mr. Hickey. Just the thought of him makes him feel sour and unclean, and he can’t say why. “But I swear to you, I am not angry with you and I’m certainly not in hiding. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Come down to the garden with me, then. Please.”

“I’m really quite busy, Henry.”

“—It’s plain you’re not even working, Harry. Look. Your burner’s off, your hands are clean. You’re not even in your apron, and I know you’d not work without that. What do you do up here all day?”

“It’s cool here,” Harry says. “I can’t bear the sun.”

Henry considers this. It’s true that the lab, this corner chamber boxed in on all sides by dense pine, is one of the coolest areas of the house, and Goodsir’s always wilted quickly in the heat. (Once, he’d nearly fainted. Collins recalls settling his head in his lap, tipping a flask of cool water to his lips. The delicate bobbing of his throat as he swallowed.) “A short walk in the garden won’t kill you,” he scolds. 

Harry bows his head, rubs his eyes with his fingertips, then picks up his spectacles from where they lie atop the book he’d had tucked under his arm when he’d opened the door for Collins. Now Collins bends a little and cocks his head to read the title: “ _Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus_. Right scientific reading, doctor,” he teases. He always finds a way to slip right into Goodsir’s personal space, prompting him to wonder if perhaps he does so deliberately. The mere speculation is enough to provoke an inappropriate response on the part of his body, so he takes a step back, hands clasped at his waist. “It’s really quite good. A bit melodramatic in places, but...” he trails off with a fretful little smile. “Come then. Let us go see how your Arcadia is faring.”

To the amateur eye, the garden at Irewood is not a garden at all but a feral profusion of flora where the roil of bloom and stalk and leaf flourish by mere chance. But neither Goodsir nor Collins are amateurs. Goodsir, standing tentatively to one side, his hands clasped behind his back, knows the Latin name for each thing growing there, and Collins every affectionate nickname given by the old wives. Between them both they carry the whole of Eden in their mouths. For this is what it is like: a study of what Eden must have been before Adam discovered the art of espaliering. All the color of a rich woman’s bijouterie, but chaotically arrayed. 

Collins is glad to have Goodsir at his side. He regards him from the corner of his eye—a small and slender man with an abundance of dark stubborn curls framing unusual but gentle features. Collins especially likes the way his lips seem to cup tenderly the words he speaks, how his eyes—even when he is exhausted and pallid, as he looks today even in the soft light of the temperate afternoon—have a deep softness in them. 

“Are you sure you’re well?” Collins says. “You don’t look well.”

“I’m perfectly fine, Henry. I am... unaccustomed to being out of doors, that is all.”

“Then you must come out more. Each day, like you used to.”

“You speak as though I’m missed.”

“Oh, I miss you terribly. Honest I do.” Collins tries to keep from sounding too eager, too earnest. 

“You’ve Mr. Hickey for company.” Collins hears a trace of what, from anyone else’s lips, might be jealousy. 

“He’s not you,” Collins says. “And he’s a funny kind of company besides.” 

“Oh? How’s that?” 

“I don’t know how to describe it. He’s just a curious man is all. I believe he has traveled a great deal and knows a great many things—about a great many things, odds and ends—and yet I have no... sense of him. As a man, I mean.” He pauses to rub a lemonbalm leaf between his thumb and forefinger, sniffs. He holds his fingers out for Goodsir to smell also, which he does. Collins briefly wonders what would happen were he, with these anointed fingers, to stroke those lips—well, he thinks such things often enough, and with more dismay than longing these days, for Goodsir is a man into whose calculations intimacy never enters. Still, there’s a mischievous flirtatious streak to Collins that he doesn’t bother tamping down and now he hands it the reins. “Sweet this year,” he says, stroking the corner of Goodsir’s mouth with his thumb. 

Goodsir swallows visibly and looks down at the ground, where something catches his eye. He kneels. “What’s this?” He fingers the leaves of a little herb growing from a humus-rich, squared-off spot. Its stem and stalk are a dull, dark blue; its curled little leaves are a richer silvery violet at midrib and fade to pale green along the veins. 

“It’s—something of Hickey’s, sir.”

“Something? What, precisely?”

“I—am not certain.”

“You know something, Henry. You would not ‘sir’ me otherwise.”

“He says it’s an aphrodisiac.”

Harry fingers the leaves thoughtfully, noting the glistening powder that coats them. “There are no real aphrodisiacs,” he explains. “Though there are herbs that can heighten one’s perception of ... certain stimuli.”

“Certain stimuli?”

“You know perfectly well what I refer to, Henry.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Collins says, taking a small step toward where Goodsir kneels before him. Goodsir glances up; the tip of his tongue darts out to wet his lips. His eyes are dilated and wild. He holds out his hand to be helped up. For a long, electrified moment they just stare at one another, then Goodsir is tilting his head as Collins lowers his—then through the still, fragrant, warm air comes the faint rattle of wheels on the path up from the main road.


	4. A Different Beast

“Mr. Peglar, I believe,” Goodsir says, shading his eyes with his hand. They watch the man hop down from the buggy and stand in the courtyard, glancing about himself uncertainly. Irewood is a place where decorum holds no real sway, nevertheless he knows enough of manor etiquette to recognize the impropriety of inquiring after a servant at the sprawling manor’s main entrance. Collins casts a last lingering sidewise look over Goodsir, notes with a pang the adorable way he’s crinkled his brow. Goodsir returns the look with a wan, fretful smile. Already Collins can feel him cringing away, hardening against what nearly happened. If there is anything he can say to woo him he must say it now, but his tongue lies sluggish and sour in his mouth. And the moment passes. 

“Give Mr. Peglar my regrets,” Goodsir says in a nervous little voice. “It has gotten very warm just now. I feel I must return to my lab.” And with that, he turns and walks toward the side of the house, glancing one last time at Collins before slipping in furtively through a side door as though entering a stranger’s house unbidden.

Collins takes a moment to calm his blood, will his breath to quiet, then walks down the path from the garden to greet his closest friend. He leads him into the house, past the sitting room and into the drawing room, which he once tried to keep ready for visitors, though he knew the notoriously reclusive Dr. Goodsir rarely received any. Now, like the other few areas of the crumbling manse that are not boarded off, the drawing room has been appropriated for something more useful; in this case, it is a sort of haphazard nursery for plant starts and other delicate flora. Ferns overflow spindly-legged tables, soil is ground into faded oriental rugs. 

A massive tome on the cultivation of exotic herbs lies open on the settee where Hickey had left it, and as Collins picks it up he recalls with a funny mix of annoyance and warmth the way Hickey had sprawled belly-down on the floor reading it. Munching on an apple, taking great big bites. It was like the fellow was determined to imbue even the most mundane actions with a kind of provocativeness—as though, at every turn, he had to demonstrate how terribly unique and clever he was. 

“Please don’t go spreading reports of this place’s condition back in town,” Collins says to Peglar with a wink. Then he pauses. “Wait...” he says, holding up his hand and cocking his ear toward the door. “Don’t eavesdrop, doctor,” he calls out. “Beastly manners.” There’s a tiny, almost apologetic squeak of a floorboard as the doctor steps away from the door. Collins waits for the wheezing creak of his tread on the stair before resuming. “Anyway. You’ll excuse the state of the place. Bachelor life, you know.” 

“Now, that’s no excuse,” Peglar says with a gentle laugh, settling into the spot Collins has cleared for him. “John and I are bachelors both and—“

“You’re the most henpecked pair of husbands there ever were! Why you’d henpeck one another, I can’t imagine—“

Peglar’s eyes jolt wide. “Henry, hush!”

“The good doctor has gone up the stairs, and besides, I have reason to believe he’s in no position to condemn you. You interrupted rather a moment, you know.”

“Oh? Rotten timing? I’m truly sorry.” 

“ ‘Oh’ nothing.” Collins grins and lifts his brow. But then his face falls. “But he’s so skittish, you know. He’ll no doubt think better of it, given the interruption. But surely you didn’t come here just to ascertain whether I’m still miserably smitten with him?”

“No, but I’m glad to hear you are. I’d wondered if... well, never mind.”

“Don’t you _never mind_ me, sir.”

“I thought perhaps you’d taken up with that Hickey fellow.”

Collins makes a face. “Pardon me, but why in the ever-loving hell would I do that?”

“In the meantime, I thought, perhaps—elsewise, why would you—listen, my friend, you must know—I don’t mean to have offended you—“

“You know damn well how difficult it is to offend me. And to tell the truth, I could do with a ‘meantime’. I’d not want to cross Billy Gibson, though.”

“Ah, you could lick ‘im.”

“Aye, but I’m a peaceable man. And Hickey ain’t worth the scrap.” 

“No. That’s what I’ve come about. John wants his head.” 

“What for? And before you speak, recall that he is in Goodsir’s employ, not mine. If he’s committed some manner of transgression—“

“It concerns a rather private matter. If we—that is, John and I collectively—might be spared his knowing...”

“I cannot guarantee that, my friend. I am sorry.”

Peglar stares gloomily down at his own hands. “He—it’s so terribly embarrassing, Henry. And will sound like damned lunacy besides. But you must believe me.” He fetched a deep breath before raising his eyes. “I believe he has a powerful—agent of some kind, in the tobacco he smokes. And with it he somehow induced John and I to—“ his mouth works nervously about the words he speaks, as though he must move them into place just so. “—display our intimacies to him most wantonly.”

“John as well?” Collins asks, lifting his heavy brow. Peglar has a well-concealed wild streak but he cannot for the life of him imagine John Bridgens, a man about as open and unorthodox as a turnip, doing anything whatsoever _most wantonly_ , not even in the privacy of his own home. “The man who keeps his undershirt on—“

“The same. Most willingly. We were both most willing, in the moment... but I swear we would not have done it had we not been... again, I say, induced...” he concludes lamely. “It sounds absurd, Henry. I know it does—“

Collins can feel the blood drain from his cheeks as a chill wave washes over him. He thinks of waking on the hard floor of the cellar kitchen with his prick out like an incontinent senile; he thinks of the little bruise-black weed teething its weird little way up through the soil. He also recalls now—a fragmented, unreal memory, something he’d thought he’d dreamed—how he’d knelt before Goodsir’s chair and, nosing then seat like a hound, taken himself in hand. _Most wantonly._ In a wink he’s on his feet, lurching toward the door and out before either Peglar or Goodsir—who’d crept stealthily back down the stairs and who’d barely had time to scrabble back from the keyhole before the door to the corridor was flung open—can register his rage. That’s how sudden it is, how immense. That’s how _he_ is, Goodsir recalls, striding silently along behind him and Peglar toward the old cottage in the pines. 

The three of them stumble to a halt at the edge of the clearing. Gilded by the late afternoon light, Hickey and Billy kneel on a blanket in the grass, the one behind the other, pressing slowly into him, drawing out, pressing in again. A slow, metered rhythm. Hickey’s got ahold of Billy’s throat as Billy snaps his bent hips back at each thrust. His eyes are shut, his face raised to the sun; his long legs are spread wide to accommodate Hickey. Hearing them approach, Hickey raises his head from where it rests on Billy’s back to lock eyes with each of them in turn. But he doesn’t stop. 

“Jesus,” Collins hears Goodsir breathe faintly. Not generally a blasphemer, that one, but were anything to tease The Lord’s name in vain from his lips, this might qualify. 

“Like wild dogs,” Peglar mutters, sounding nearly admiring. 

Collins, standing between the two, is silent. His mouth is slightly open and he’s panting from the exertion of stomping through the woods. He’d been planning to—what, exactly? _You’re a peaceable man,_ he reminds himself. With each shallow breath he’s slightly calmer. It feels like a very long time that they stand there, the three of them in the shade of the pines and the other two spotlit by the milky afternoon sun, but really it’s only a matter of a few stretching seconds before Billy, who seems to move in an ecstatic trance, also notices them there. He bucks Hickey off and scrambles to his feet, yanking the blanket up to cover himself. Hickey glances at him in this guileless, wounded way before insouciantly tucking his cock back into his pants. 

To Collins’ surprise, Goodsir speaks first. “The herb,” he says, taking a few steps forward. “Tell me about it.” 

Hickey grins and tilts his head. “I didn’t know you counted botany amongst your interests, doctor.”

“It’s a remarkable little plant, is all—if it does what Mr. Peglar says it does.”

“Mr. Peglar, to be frank, didn’t need much convincing,” Hickey says, sliding closer. There’s a conspiratorial spark in his eye that makes Collins bristle. He wants to see Goodsir’s face, read it—get closer. Hickey goes on. “But It did make Mr. Bridgens... more convivial, true.” He shrugs. “What of it? Alcohol can do the same, as can cannabis and opium.”

“No,” Goodsir says in a soft tone Collins doesn’t quite recognize. “This is a different beast altogether.” He steps closer to Hickey, and Collins edges closer too. Something like rage is returning to him: brother to it, sliding along in its shadow. It’s the warmth in Hickey’s eye that galls him, the rolling sidle in his step. If he gets one inch closer to Goodsir, he’ll make him bleed, he will. He’ll pummel that sharp, luminous little face into a clump of bruises and oozing blood. With pleasure. 

But at that moment Goodsir steps back. “I should like to—have a sample of it,” he says simply.

“Oh, doctor. Why didn’t you say so?” He turns to retrieve his tobacco pouch from where it lies at Billy’s feet. 

“No, no, no—goodness, Mr. Hickey. I have no desire to try it myself. I mean, for my lab. A specimen.”

“A specimen, hmm.” Hickey draws a cigarette, already rolled, from the pouch and sets it between his lips. Fishes out a match. Goodsir shakes his head and takes three long steps backwards. Hickey grins as he inhales. “Relax. This one’s plain tobacco. But a specimen will cost you.”

“I’m sure I can pay.”

“You must try it. That is the cost. If you share a cigarette with me, you may have some.”

Goodsir glances over his shoulder at Collins. It is at this moment that Peglar, who has been steadily inching back from the whole group, lifts his hand in farewell, turns, and trots back the way they came. Goodsir watches him go, then returns his gaze to Collins. His face is earnest, his brow crinkled with worry. Collins, without understanding why or what he’s agreeing to, nods. 

“Mr. Collins,” Goodsir says. “He and I will take it together. Alone.”

Hickey shakes his head. “Not alone,” he says.

Goodsir looks at Collins again. “This might be it,” he says apologetically. For the formula, he means. But that’s not Hickey’s business. 

“You don’t touch him,” Collins says.

Hickey shrugs, grins. “You won’t care if I do,” he says. “You’ll be too gone to care.”


	5. Fever Dreams

He vaguely suspects he’ll regret it later, but right now Harry Goodsir has no compunctions whatsoever about the fact that his nose is buried in the coarse, pungent tangle of Henry Collins’ pubic hair while Hickey strokes the tender space between his shoulders encouragingly. He’s dopey on the scent and taste of Collins, dizzy and stupid. _Collins... and that damnable weed,_ he tries to remind himself. But this certainly doesn’t feel like the chance byproduct of a biochemical reaction. The sensations, perhaps, are more intense than they might otherwise have been, but his joy is the unalloyed joy of a hungry dog at last fed. It is pure and unthinking, and is drawn up from the roots of instinctive appetite; this—(Collins’ immense cock leaps as he curls his fingers around it, finds they don’t quite fit)—is, in short, where he is meant as an animal and a man to be. Nothing could be more natural. He feels his lips stretch into a giddy grin against the thumb-thick under-ridge of the thing. 

Hickey, with his impeccably obnoxious timing, interrupts Goodsir’s bliss with a sharp little squeeze at the back of his neck. “Are you ready to give it another try?” He refers, of course, to Goodsir’s first attempt to take the ponderous entirety of Collins’ cock into his mouth, which was aborted when he gagged so hard he thought he might vomit. “Or...” Hickey murmurs as his grip on Goodsir’s neck puddles down into a warm, slow massage, “perhaps you’d like to cut your teeth on something less daunting.”

That he even considers this proposal should concern Goodsir and he knows it, but the fact is, the thought of taking Hickey in his mouth is not a repulsive one. In fact, the vision flashes in his mind’s eye of him doing exactly that and, god help him, it sends a little shudder of pleasure down his spine and through his prick. Actually, any cock would fill whatever it is that has yawned open in him these past few months, longings and visions long buried—the bodies of other men, flashes of muscular flesh—mostly, visions of himself kneeling, acquitting himself pleasingly, being told he’s good—

“Good lord, Mr. Hickey,” he replies, shaking his head. He aims for disdain but it comes out drily coquettish, more of a _later_ than a _no_. His cheeks burn and he hopes Collins has not caught this exchange, but Collins is sunk deep in his own experience, exploring his own bare chest with one hand and the other heavy in Goodsir’s hair—inches from Hickey’s fingers on his neck. Goodsir feels weighted down, cherished: cats purr, flowers twist toward the sun; Goodsir hums softly and shifts his hips lazily into line with Collins’ calves. 

“Let’s give it another try,” Hickey says.

“Is he even awake? Is it right?”

Hickey gives Collins’ thigh a little kick. When and why did he take off his boots? His feet are white and narrow, the arches elegantly high. His cuffs rolled up reveal a delicate ankle bone. The soles of his feet are pale too, lacking the yellowish tinge around the edge that denote callusing. He wonders briefly if there’s a streak of vanity to Hickey; more importantly he wonders what the shallow, fine curve of that Achilles’ tendon would feel like against his lips, cupped tenderly in the taut curl of his tongue. 

Collins opens his eyes and grins. “I can feel your voices on my skin,” he says dreamily. “ ‘s nice.”

“How’d you like to feel Harry’s mouth on your cock?” 

Collins’ prick twitches in Goodsir’s hand and he nods, lifting his head to look at him. “Yes,” he says. “ _Oh,_ yes.”

It looms above Goodsir like—an obelisk, a monument to... whatever. A monument to itself, it could be, deserving as it is of some kind of tribute. He rocks up onto his elbows and opens wide, pushing his spread tongue across the glans to gather the flavor of it. It tastes plain enough—the flesh itself tastes almost like nothing, actually, but for the subtle salt tang of the beading of fluid that his strokes, lazy and haphazard as they are, have won him. Experimentally he blades his tongue-tip into the slit where the head, a more impatient pink than the rest, peeks out; this elicits a long, low moan from Collins so Goodsir does it again. 

“More,” Collins grunts, trying to thrust into Goodsir’s mouth and tightening his grip in his curls. But Hickey, anticipating all like an adept host, anchors him with one bare foot on his hip and a little scolding cluck of his tongue. 

“Go ahead and try,” he murmurs then to Goodsir, “Slow and easy.” He cups the back Goodsir’s head, his slender fingers brushing Collins’ thick ones. “Slow as you need.” He can barely get his lips around it; his tongue has no place to go. Hickey laughs quietly and begins to push, a steady downward pressure, until Collins’ glans presses against the tender downward curve of his soft palate toward his uvula. “Breathe through it, breathe through it. Let your throat be—soft.” Both men’s hands stroke him reassuringly now and it encourages him to sink further down, ever so incrementally. “Good,” Hickey breathes. “You’re doing beautifully. Isn’t he doing beautifully, Henry?” and through his jammed-full mouth, somehow, through the hot weight of his palm in his hair, Goodsir can feel Collins nod eagerly, can picture in his mind’s eye the look on his face, lips parted and lids heavy, panting softly; _Christ_ , what a lovely creature Collins is; he’s his favorite thing in the whole of creation. 

Now Hickey is saying, “You will gag here but you can take it. Now.” With that, Hickey tightens his grip and gives Goodsir’s head a twisting little shove and indeed he gags, coughs; the muscles of his arms and back flex to push himself up but Hickey’s hold is unyielding as he presses him further down. “You’re fine,” he scolds. “Keep going.” And it’s true: two, three more seconds, another inch, and he’s astonished to feel himself breathing through his nose, the chill of tears on his cheeks and the ticklish sting of them in his eyes, but—he’s there, and Collins’ cockhead is past his uvula, filling his throat as perfectly as a finger in a lambskin glove. 

“Now, every time you hit that—that spot, you might gag,” Hickey is advising, his voice soft and curiously breathless, “but push through it. You’re not likely to actually be sick.” Hickey’s hand leaves Goodsir’s head to unfasten the placket of his trousers. “Now see if you can get all the way down. And Henry, you’re being so good for us. So patient. I can see how you’re trembling, your thighs trembling: you want to just fuck his face, don’t you? I know you do. But you’re being so forbearing, bless you. Now, Harry—can you make it all the way down?” 

Harry presses, presses—the muscles of his throat burn as they stretch and tears flow freely down his cheeks. “Ah, Jesus,” Collins gasps, twisting his fist in Goodsir’s curls. One last thrust he’s done it: his nose is pressed flat against Collins’ pelvic bone. His own prick is hard and leaking against Collins’ calf and ankle and without even noticing it he’s begun to grind against his leg. As abjectly desperate as a street dog. Rather than shame, he feels curiously elated. Free. He is, he feels, exactly where he should be. And he could spend this way, easily. His only regret is that he’s not kneeling at Collins’ feet. 

Suddenly Hickey grabs Goodsir’s hand and raises it to his own neck. There, just to one side of his Adam’s apple, bulging out from within, is the head of Collins’ cock. The flesh of his throat feels thin, distended: he raises himself up and feels it slide beneath his skin, as though it were part of him. But at the same time, it is alien, unseemly; that it is both at once is somehow electrifying to him and he hears—feels—himself moan around the ungiving bulk of it. Then Collins reaches down too to feel himself, roughly fingering the swell of his own glans from within another man’s body. “Fuck,” he mutters hoarsely and Goodsir can feel, honestly _feel_ , against the wall of his throat, a little droplet of fluid blossom. 

“Can you feel his fingers?” Hickey asks, his own hand busy between his thighs. “Can you feel your own?” 

Collins nods, his eyes wide, lips parted. Goodsir catches Collins’ eye and slowly begins to slide down, up, down again, his lips and throat stretched to the point of a most delicious, unnatural pain. 

It hadn’t started out this well. The four of them—Collins, Goodsir, Hickey, and Billy—had come down to the kitchen, where Collins laid out as generous a spread as before. But this time Hickey alone ate with relish, jamming whole slices of fatly buttered bread into his mouth and washing it down with great swigs of lukewarm ale. Three thick slices of cold ham he ate, smeared with sweet mustard and coarse-ground pepper, and afterwards an apple and a peach. “You build up an appetite,” he noted cheerily as he chewed ( _disgusting urchin,_ Goodsir remembers thinking) and elbowed Billy in the ribs. Goodsir eyed them both with something akin to disappointment. It was at this point, actually, that Billy took his leave, still stung and humiliated, it seemed; his manner sullenly deferential. After he left, Collins eyed his empty chair. _How terrible it must be,_ he thinks, _to be the thing that Hickey loves. And how ghastly to love him back, how difficult._

Not that Collins knows much about love. He’d only ever loved one man, Goodsir, and gotten no return for it. In his younger days, he was what they euphemistically called _a messenger boy_ , for many of his kind had to supplement their work by running through the streets delivering messages. But he always earned his way, popular not only because he was he—all muscle and cock and a glad _come on, then_ grin—but also because he took so much guileless joy in what the other lads and girls of his vocation sourly referred to as work. Hell, he probably would’ve done it for free. And he knew not one bit of shame for it. He did not believe in sin. But as the years passed something stretched open around him, an emptiness. It hovered like smoke in the dark corners of his room; it sagged from his heart like a pulley. He even fancied some nights he felt it threading through his veins and capillaries like a poison, one that would eventually sicken him. 

Then Mrs. Jane Franklin, a wealthy vicar’s wife who ran a charity reforming what she called “lost boys”, helped him discover in himself an aptitude for gardening so keen that she hired him to tend to the gardens of her husband’s country vicarage in Irewood. Plants, Collins discovered, woke and withered by the dictate of a different clock: not gridded but tethered to the weather. Into them he could pour himself, tending and learning and watching. The now-familiar emptiness, though it did not abate, dwindled in its consequence. So he might be lonely, and so a false spring might gull the cherry blossoms into early bloom. It was all the same to him. He grew to be acutely aware of the shifting of the seasons but came to disregard the passage of years. 

And when he grew so lonely it addled his brain, made him ill-tempered, he’d hitch a ride to Stroud on a wool wagon and find there a way to take the edge off his appetite. The irony was not lost on him that he should come to patronize the same type of boy he once was, and he was always especially kind to them. But this did nothing for the emptiness, that poisonous nothing in the shape of an other. A wife, had he been an ordinary man. He began to regret, at last, that he was not. One fall morning he woke next to a coltish pale-eyed boy who claimed nineteen years, and saw himself for what he was: a wretchedly lonely man of thirty-two. Too old, certainly, to slake himself with rentboys on long market weekends. He left what he owed on the pillow and departed determined to honor his loneliness as a monk honors God. By the time he made it back to the vicarage he was sick with fever, and believed at last in sin: he knew now that loneliness unacknowledged was one of its thousand faces. 

Dr. Goodsir tended to him in this long sickness. About his convalescence, he recalls—so many things. He can assemble no linear narrative but rather a series of vignettes, as vivid as oil paintings—a chain of fever dreams. He recalls pulling Goodsir’s hands to his chest, proselytizing to him on the sin of loneliness. He recalls Goodsir reading to him from horticultural texts, his voice warm and undulant as a lullaby. He recalls Goodsir’s face, a diffuse radiance bobbing on the tide of his fever like the moon’s reflection. He recalls asking after the citizens of his garden, left defenseless against the winter—without it ever occurring to him that he might himself die. Months later, after he’d recovered completely, Goodsir miserably confessed to him that he might have. 

“But you didn’t let me,” Collins had answered. 

“No,” Goodsir had responded with a soft laugh. “Inasmuch as it was in my hands.” 

“But it was,” Collins said with a clap to the other man’s shoulder. 

“You’ve too much faith in medicine.”

“Not medicine. You.”

Now for a moment he struggles to reconcile the face that looked as soft as mercy itself in sickness with the one regarding him now—flushed, gleaming with tears and sweat, the eyes dark with unabated lust, the mouth distended around him; he sees that it is the same face but cannot force the two to coalesce. For if Goodsir had this in him, this immense hunger, would not he have known it somehow, felt it in his bones? Would not they have loved one another long before this?

But the trouble—and the beauty—of this herb of Hickey’s is that the minute you’ve grabbed ahold of a coherent thought, any novel physical sensation, amplified a hundredfold, splinters it like a boot heel does spring ice. Now Goodsir has figured out some way to contract and loosen the opening of his throat as he takes the whole brute length of him, a pretty little trick and he knows it—he grins round Collins’ girth as much as he’s able, and his eyes gleam with a kind of shy pride. 

“Feels so good, Harry,” Collins says. “Feels... wonderful. You keep going like that, I’m going to, ah...”

“That’s it,” Hickey murmurs, kneading his bare toes into Collins’ hip and belly like a contented cat, “tell him how it feels. Tell him what a good pet he is.” Hickey’s pulling unhurriedly at himself and cocks his head with a soft grin as he speaks. There’s a burnished, fey radiance about him in this low amber light. Collins strokes his foot absent-mindedly and watches as his head drops back in lazy ecstasy. He’s beautiful too, he hates to admit, but not half so much as Goodsir, who at this moment draws his mouth almost all the way off of him, sucks just at the tip, and swallows his whole length again. 

“Is that true?” Collins manages. “Are you—ah—a good pet, _my_ pet?”

Goodsir nods eagerly as he draws his mouth up again, cupping Collins’ shaft with his tongue. His lips are red, swollen, his eyes intent. Collins can feel him squirming rhythmically against his leg exactly like that, a little dog, and though he’s never been one for games of power, something at once unkind and equally desperate is pleased by it. Pleasure begins to from the root of his cock like—he imagines roots shooting through soil, but quicker, like lightning forking, and that’s him, that’s his body: so much loamy soil and pregnant sky. “Careful!” he cries out, but Goodsir grins and slides his mouth back down to the base of Collin’s pulsing cock. Collins feels him trying to swallow it as it comes, but he can’t catch it all. There’s—so much, it’s been so long. The surfeit rolls down his shaft like wax down a candle. This too Goodsir cleans up, licking it up and sucking it from his fingers. Fastidious. Panting. Then the rhythm of his hips against Collins’ calf stutters and his eyes jolt wide, a look in them almost like wonder, like he sees God before him, “Oh,” he pants. “Oh, Henry—tell me again, I’m your pe—pe—pet—“

“You’re my pet,” Collins says, “my little dear one. Such a good and perfect pet...” He strokes Goodsir’s cheek with his thumb as he comes, whining and writhing, against Collins’ calves. He drags himself up into Collins’ arms then, panting mouth against Collins heart. When Hickey, too, brings himself off, spattering Goodsir’s back as he lies curled against Collins, both men grin softly: it completes their bliss, somehow, in the distant and trifling way a songbird at the window might.


	6. Nothing, and Then Something

The sweltering weeks that follow are consumed in a hazy, slick glut of fucking while Hickey pads about the disintegrating mansion doing whatever pleases him. He ventures into the farthest wings and chambers of the seventeenth-century manor, even prying off aged boards hammered up by Goodsir’s forebears. He makes small repairs; books disappear from shelves and are hoarded somewhere. Goodsir is distantly annoyed by all of this, suspicious. But immediately he is always too occupied with Collins’ sprawling Eden of a body to do anything about it. 

What does Hickey eat? Where does he sleep? What kind of eerie magic is it that he seems to appear precisely and only when he’s needed? Like a little poltergeist he is, the sporadic hammering racket of his work an off-tempo accompaniment to the soft, glad murmur of Collins and Goodsir talking late into the night, which eventually pitches into moaning and whimpering and the cry of over-exerted bedsprings. Then, afterwards, comes the low, sweet postlude of laughter, tired talk—the aimless, radiantly unguarded conversation new lovers share until the moment sleep claims them. 

Hickey sometimes, on nights like this, kneels at the keyhole and listens. They keep their voices low but there’s a silvery, nodding rhythm to it: sometimes he lies down, lets it rock over him in the dark. And thinks of Billy. A scab he shouldn’t pick at, Billy is, but once he starts he digs and twists til he’s bleeding. 

( _Because you meddle,_ Billy had said, _with things you oughtn’t._

 _Use your own words, Billy. You can at least do me that honor._ For those were Bridgens’ words in Billy’s mouth; it was his will behind it. Billy dropped his gaze, shifted his weight from one long leg to the other. _All right,_ Hickey had continued. _If it be your will. But choices have consequences, Billy._

 _What the hell does that mean, Cornelius?_ Billy was studying his face, gaze darting in a lazy saccade between his mouth and eyes, lips lax in that way of his when he’s honestly trying to figure something out. It was a beautiful look on him: bless his dumb, bony heart. Hickey committed it to memory, that expression of inchoate panic, and walked away without answering.) 

Quietly now Hickey lies down on his side, curled knee to chin in the dark corridor. If he falls asleep there, no one will mind: no one ever has minded where he’s slept or how. 

As June thickens into July, Collins and Goodsir slowly return to their lives. Collins begins going to church and market again; Goodsir back to his lab. It’s only that now night finds them together. Intolerably smitten, Hickey thinks—really, enough is enough—but he holds his tongue, for they still let him watch sometimes. This, he suspects, is more Goodsir’s desire than Collins’. He’s overfond of praise, that one is; craves to be fawned over like a bright-eyed pup. Which, to be fair, he is as devoted to Collins as any loyal hound should be: would lick his boots clean if he asked. But such a subservient will is wasted on Collins, who won’t even permit Goodsir to kneel at his feet during meals. Hickey would know how to handle such sweetness: how to turn it in on itself, set it gnawing at its own honeycomb gut. 

Hickey goes to the village with them one Sunday, lingering in the churchyard as the pious file out after service. His eyes rest briefly on the vicar: a tall man with a pouchy face, capacious bottom, and a thin-lipped, wide mouth that twines over the doughy swoop of his jaw like a bit of wire. He doesn’t look nearly adventurous to have lost a leg, but he’s all polished wood from the right hip down. He looks stern and a bit witless: wilier is his wife, by far. As her gaze brushes impassively over him, he recalls something about Collins having come from London with the two of them. _Saved_ , Billy had said. But he didn’t say from what. 

But then he spots Billy, who’s probably the tallest man in the village. He comes shuffling out, hunched to lend his ear to the man next to him. Jealousy sunders Hickey bone and brain; he feels his face sag and makes quick to rearrange it into a smirk as he wills Billy to meet his gaze. His companion is a neatly-made, tallish man with flashing gray eyes and a plump little mouth framed by a meticulous beard. His round face would be boyish, inviting, were it not for that certain sour fixity of expression that bespeaks habitual joylessness. Billy spots Hickey and nods stiffly; his companion’s eyes follow and he whispers something into Billy’s ear. Hickey unfolds himself from the headstone he’s been sitting on and slips right through the crowd.

“Mr. Gibson,” he nods leeringly, getting right up close.

“Mr. Hickey.” Hickey’s prick opens one eye to the sound of his name in Billy’s mouth, but it’s spoken with such sheepish dismay as it is finds no reason to wake fully. “This is...” Billy falters and glances at his companion, as though seeking permission to even speak his name. As though Hickey’s ear will sully it. 

“John Irving,” he says, extending his hand stiffly. His eyes are hard; his palm sweaty. Hickey shakes with gusto but withdraws with faint disgust: sweaty palms always repulse him; it’s one of the few uninvited intimacies that feel improper to him. But here and now it’s a small triumph—a sign of a bark so much worse than the bite. 

His grin widens. He explains that he had meant to come to service this morning but had balked at the last moment, fearing— _well,_ he confesses with a wolf’s sheepishness, _my own comeuppance._

“ _All_ men can be redeemed, Mr. Hickey,” Irving says with a discomfiting earnestness. His hard gaze unflinching. 

Hickey shuffles closer, head tilted up—close enough Irving can no doubt smell the tobacco on his breath. “Even the unrepentant?”

Irving—blushes. He’s incensed, verging on apoplectic, but the blush is the humiliated blush of a maiden. Hickey lets the moment swell and billow, lets the silence rise like a dirty tide. A silt wash of potentialities, of things unsaid. 

“Please, Cornelius,” Billy pleads at last. “Please.”

———

Yet he comes back to him in the morning. Not finding him in the cottage, he approaches the main entrance, where Collins spots him through the window—he’s watering his ferns—and opens the door before Billy can knock, his finger to his lips. He points then to Goodsir asleep on the sofa.

Billy nods, vexed—just napping like that, out in the public sphere of the house. His parents wouldn’t have stood for it—but there were many things they did not stand for, which is how the eldest son of so prominent family found himself working as a barkeep in a nowhere village on the far side of England from them. Goodsir’s collar is loosened, his knee propped up against the back of the sofa. He assumes they’ve kept up with whatever it was Hickey had planned for them that afternoon in the clearing. Unbidden, he tries to imagine how they fit, exactly—which one slots where into the other? Fast or slow? Do they love each other? 

( _You pretend you don’t want to hear about it,_ Hickey had teased him once. _All these dirty things. But you’re curious._

_No. I’m not like you, Cornelius._

_You’re not, which I’m glad for._ They were lying on their backs in the grass, watching twilight thicken into night. The stars one by one appearing. That’s never ceased to amaze Billy: there is nothing, and then something. Soft dark, then a prick of light. _It makes you feel less lonely,_ Hickey had said. _Less foul. But you’re not, you know. Not like I am._ )

Hickey’s made a nest for himself in the hindmost chamber of the house. They mount three flights of stairs to get there, passing innumerable locked rooms, or doors ajar offering glimpses of furniture sheeted in the dark. Discolored portraits, singing floorboards. On the walls of Hickey’s room, the the peeling remnants of mural depict bucolic idylls: a limpid-gazed maiden embraces an indifferent ram. One breast is exposed, perfectly spherical and mounted too high on the chest; a satyr leers from behind a pillar. Everything else is guesswork: here’s a bare leg and foot, there’s half a deer, head raised. But most of it’s worn away, revealing damp-streaked bare wall of no particular color. In the center of the room, a bare mattress is centered on a red, sun-faded Persian rug. A chair by a curtainless window, candles half-burnt along the ledge. Several vases of fresh flowers line the room’s perimeter to drive off the pervasive scent of mildew and cheap tallow. 

This whole time Billy’s preparing to explain about John Irving and how he is only trying to see him onto the right path. That there’s nothing between them—Irving’s not _that way_ anyway. He might even slip in a joke about how Irving’s already married to Christ, nun like, withering in his piety. But they’re barely into the room and Hickey’s got him pinned against the wall, up on tippy toes and licking open his teeth. Billy opens, sinks, surrenders. Before he knows it Hickey’s knees are between his thighs, urging them open; but this—this Billy’s ready for. He draws himself up tall. “No,” he says. “Other way round this time.” 

Hickey hesitates, looking stung, then nods. “If you’re careful,” he beseeches.

“I’ll be more careful than you are, if that’s what you mean,” Billy says. 

It’s been a long time since Hickey’s allowed anyone to have him this way, and even longer since anyone’s used their mouth to ready him. First he laps gently with the broad of his tongue, a soak of soft heat, then quicker, more deliberate. He traces little rings around the gradually slackening hole, urges it wider with the bladed tip. Hickey cannot bear it, but he can’t not bear it, for Billy’s got his arms wrapped around his thighs and hips, pinning him under the supple plank of his weight. And his mouth is merciless. He could nearly spend from this alone, and tells Billy so; Billy lifts his head along enough to give him a soft and hazy grin before continuing. Like he’s proud. Hickey wants to crush him; Hickey wants to pool like water at his feet. 

“Please, Billy,” he pleads at last. “Please.” He drops his face between his crossed arms, his spine and ribs curled in on themselves. A kind of tawny, translucent pallor in the candlelight, like a discarded cicada shell. He learned a long time ago to cry silently, so no one would hear. And when he spends from Billy’s tongue alone it’s with tears cooling on his cheeks.


	7. Adder’s Tongue

Irving’s a thin man beneath his clothing and apparently easily overcome by the sun, for despite his air of rigidity he’s soon stripped to his shirt sleeves as the three of them wander the paths of Collins’ garden. He’d nearly not come on account of a headache: _they seem to come on with the heat,_ he’d explained with a slight wince. And it _is_ a hot day—the very air seems to vibrate with heat. Hickey gets a crooked little smirk on his face every time he catches Billy looking at the neat line of Irving, his dark hair—gleaming with sweat—and lips so full they seem almost swollen. 

“Here,” Hickey says, tearing off and pinching into a plug some leaves of spring haze. “This’ll help your headache.”

“What is it?” Irving regards him suspiciously.

“It’s an old wives’ remedy. The name slips my mind just now.”

“Do I just—”

“Just chew it a bit, til the leaves get tacky, then spit it out. Like to give you a bellyache if you swallow it.”

Irving studies his face carefully, then takes the bunched leaves in his fingertips. Not taking his eyes from Hickey’s, he slips them between his full, parted lips and chews cautiously. 

“It’s good,” he says in a tone of faint surprise.

“Kind of peppery, no? Related to the nasturtium, I believe.”

“Nasturtium?”

“Oh, that’s a flower you can eat! I’d not heard of it either. But Mr. Collins and Dr. Goodsir have them all the time in salads.” 

“Hmm.” He’s still staring into Hickey’s face, studying his mouth now. He licks his own plump lower lip and turns down the garden path to examine a stalk of hollyhocks. 

“I did not think he’d be so trusting,” Hickey muses, watching him wipe the back of his neck with his handkerchief.

“Wanted to… prove something, I suppose.” Gibson eyes him uneasily. “Will he be all right?”

“Certainly he will. More than.”

Irving sits down against a hedge, nestles against it, shuts his eyes. “I’m feeling—a bit fatigued,” he calls out to them.

“And how is your headache?” Hickey asks.

He drags his handkerchief across his brow. “Gone,” he pronounces with a faint air of astonishment. “But I must confess… I am feeling quite malaised.”

“I wish you hadn’t given him it, Cornelius,” Billy frets.

“You might’ve stopped me, then, were you so concerned.”

“You’d have told.”

“Told what? Nothing I can tell him he doesn’t already know about you, Billy.” Billy cocks his head. Hickey mirrors this gesture, smiling. “What is it, love?” He asks, all soft concern. “We learn to recognize each other, do we not?”

Irving rises and starts to weave a slow, ragged path down the hedgerow toward the house. Hickey and Billy jog after him. 

“Very hot,” he says decisively. “We ought to go inside, have a sip of water.”

“Ah, it’ll be no cooler indoors,” Hickey says. “Billy, bring us some water from the cistern there.”

Gibson had known Hickey meant no good inviting Irving around to see the garden, but had felt powerless to stop it, especially when, after church, Irving had expressed an especial interest in roses. He’d somewhat salved his conscience with the reassurance that any man so willing to make the acquaintance of a man he ostensibly detests deserves what’s coming to him. But this illusion can only sustain him for so long and now he catches up to Irving and is saying, his hand on his shoulder, “it’s not too late, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“What?” Irving says, smiling. His eyes are dilated. “What are you talking about, Mr. Gibson? May I please have that water?”

Billy is silent a moment then goes to the cistern, draws up a ladleful of water and carries it to Irving, who drains it in one greedy draw and gestures for another. His second, he accidentally splashes a little in his beard and down his chest, for his hands are shaking. Then he twists out of his shirt sleeves and sits before them both, skinny and panting, with this funny, lit-up look in his eyes like he’s looking at something no man has ever seen. 

Billy creeps closer and they both look at him, heads cocked. “What’s wrong with him, Cornelius? What have you done?”

“It’s… rather a more acute effect when ingested,” he says pleasantly. “Hell of a fever but we’ll get the antidote administered right quick.”

“I’m leaving, Cornelius. I am leaving and coming back with Goodsir. Where is he?”

“Bring Goodsir out and I’ll carve my name in his gut,” he says, no less pleasantly. “And anyway, I did this for you.”

“For me?”

“Isn’t _he_ the one you want, love? Tall and bonny he is, and—ah, there it is. Tall and bonny prick, too.” For as they speak, Irving fumbles himself free of his flies and, watching his own hand in slack-jawed puzzlement, begins to stroke the length of it. His grip is awkward and slack. “Have you no familiarity with this, Mr. Irving?” Hickey’s voice is warm, amused.

“Pillow,” he says sleepily. “Usually just—‘tween the pillow and the bed—”

“Why, Mr. Irving, that’s disgusting.”

“Only when necessary.” His voice is forlorn, sibilant with spit.

“When necessary?”

“‘s not a clean thing, Mr. Hickey. It’s a sin.” This last word is half-slurred and half-spat and Hickey’s grin deepens. He’s kneeling before him now, peering up into his face with a kind of clinical curiosity.

“If you think _this_ is a sin—” Hickey takes him expertly in hand— “you won’t believe the depths to which man can sink.”

Irving lolls his head round so to meet his gaze. He seems to chew on a word for a few struggling moments, but then lets it go. 

“Go on then,” Hickey says to Billy as he grabs him by his ash pale curls and pushes him down toward Irving’s flushed and straining cockstand. Billy resists. “Don’t tell me you’ve not thought about it,” Hickey continues. 

“Jealousy doesn’t suit you, Cornelius.”

“Doesn’t it? If you don’t, I will. Or _I’ll_ summon Goodsir. A right fine cocksucker he is, just bursting for the chance. You know the beast he cut his teeth on. Could make Irving weep, I bet.”

Billy regards him curiously.

“Why?” He asks at last. “Why are you always meddling? Why can’t you leave well enough alone, Cornelius?” What he means is: _why can’t it just be you and I?_ But before he even thinks it through he knows Hickey’s right: Irving’s bland, clear handsomeness has always pleased him. It’s an old affection, one gone round from friendship to one-sided lust and worn back down to platonic fondness again. Now he has a crude approximation of the man before him, a prone offering. It’s grotesque: he thinks of the puppet shows he’d seen put on by wandering bands as a boy. Yanked and tugged and bounced into a jerky simulacrum of personal will. Billy gives a soft smile that doesn’t reach his eyes: he understands. 

“I can’t because I can’t,” Hickey is saying. “Now you’d best get your mouth on that pretty prick before this fever starts eating him up inside.”

Billy bows. _It is just you and I after all,_ he thinks, taking ahold of Irving’s hand, as a friend would, and closes his lips around his shaft. Behind him, Hickey rolls a cigarette. 

———

Collins is stripped down to his shirtsleeves, his bracers worked loose and dangling from his waist, as Goodsir approaches him. He’s standing at a small, rusted wrought-iron table, a wooden stool at the book of his knees, with a tiny potted plant held in one hand. It’s some kind of fern with a single green life curling away from a lumpy stalk in the center, a frail little thing the color of new growth. Collins drips water into the black soil at its base with a bulb dropper. His broad shoulders are stooped, the pink top of his tongue held just between his teeth. 

“Hello there,” Goodsir says, so as not to startle him.

“Hello yourself,” Collins says, not looking up.

“What’s this?”

“Dwarf adder’s tongue fern. Very rare—very easy to over-water.” He beams shyly, looking sidewise at Goodsir. “It’s a delicate little thing.”

Goodsir flicks his tongue over his lips: what had he come all this way to ask him? It must have been something trifling. He puts on his spectacles and peers at the tiny plant, made all the tinier by how it’s cupped in Collins’ immense hands. He can smell Collins’ sweat and the rainy sweetness of the soil, the thick damp roil of greenery around them. He studies his lover’s face in profile and feels such joy he can barely breathe. 

“There,” Collins says softly, setting the plant gently back down on the tiny, rusted wrought-iron table and laying the bulb dropper next to it. Then he drops onto the little stool and pulls Goodsir lightly to him. They kiss, press closer. Collins is so adept at it: he’s got his tongue sucked softly in between his lips and teases his own tongue round its tip, just like a little prick’s head. Then Collins’ broad, callused hand is feeling out the shape of him in his trousers, his palm cupped round his hardness with the same interested delicacy with which it had held the potted fern. A shiver runs through Goodsir and he drops his hands to his flies.

Collins kneels. “Let me this time,” he says. For not once has he done this for Goodsir, not once has he taken that pretty little prick onto his tongue. “Please.”

Goodsir is quiet a long moment, his breath held, but then he nods. “I’ve never—”

“It’s all right, pet.” And with that he expertly draws Goodsir’s cock out and slides his mouth to the base, inhaling deeply the salty musk of the black curls in which it nests.

“Oh,” Goodsir says faintly. “ _Oh._ That—that feels phenomenal.”

“Mr. Collins, I’d no idea you had such talent for this particular act,” Hickey says as he emerges from behind a pedestal draped with potted ivy.

“Jesus,” Goodsir swears. “You startled us.” But that’s not quite true. They’ve grown to at once look for and abhor his oily presence, his way of gliding in from the periphery just in time for their most intimate moments, as though the rising of their blood generated a quiet magnetism. A whistle only dogs can hear.

Hickey shrugs. “I need your help,” he says simply.

“And what with, might I ask?—Henry, will you stop a moment, please?”

“I’ve had Irving ingest some of the stuff. It is normally quite safe. But we are… unable to bring him off, Billy and myself.” 

“I fail to see how that’s any concern of mine or Mr. Collins.”

Hickey smiles. “It’s dangerous to ingest. One develops quite a high fever, and may become quite aggressive. The trick is, figuring out what one _wants_.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“ _It_ does not invent desires but rather amplifies them, renders them unbearable unless satisfied. It’s nearly as though—you won’t believe it, gentlemen—it learns the heart of whomsoever it acts upon.”

Goodsir is unimpressed. “Have you tried reading him a bit of scripture?”

Hickey’s eyes flash with something like fear. “Just come see,” he says.

Goodsir, who has gone quite flaccid anyway, puts his prick away impatiently away and they follow Hickey out of the greenhouse, down the path, to where Irving lies sprawled in the dirt, Billy astride him. They move in a scrabbling, desperate rhythm, Irving’s eyes shot wide and desperate like a terrified horse. Every breath a high, panicked moan. 

“Put your hand on his throat,” Collins says calmly, head cocked. “Squeeze a bit.”

Billy makes no sign of having heard, but on the next upward thrust his long, thin hand shoots out and closes around the other man’s neck. Irving bucks once, then twice, then his head lolls back. “Christ,” he gasps. “Oh, good Christ.” And he spends, his plump lip ground between his teeth and his eyes rolled back in his head. Billy’s knees all scraped from the dirt.

“That’s the start of it, then,” Hickey says calmly. “Let’s go inside. It’ll be cooler.”

“How did you know that?” Goodsir asks Collins in a low voice as they walk. “To choke him?”

“He seems that type,” Collins says with a shrug. “A, ah, masochist one calls them. You’ve a bit of it yourself, I dare say.”

“Oh?”

“At least, you like to be—made use of, do you not?”

Goodsir nods, and, unbidden, the image flashes through his mind of himself kneeling beneath the table, gorged gullet-deep on Collins’ tremendous cock as he reads the newspaper, sips his tea: a vision drawn from recent life, and Hickey at the same table sat, dribbling out commentary on the matter. 

They’ve reached the front door and step silently inside. It is marginally cooler there in the plant-cluttered parlor, but not much. Still, it is instantly calming to be indoors. They lay Irving, who is still stonily hard and sweating profusely, on the couch. 

Hickey kneels next to him. “Worm,” he spits. “What other nasty secrets do you have?”

“I’d—I’d like a smoke, Mr. Hickey,” Goodsir says abruptly. “I believe I’ll be better equipped for the strangeness to come. You goddamned fool.”


End file.
